


Another Day Another Disaster

by Glinda



Series: Apocabingo [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Apocalypse, Community: tic_tac_woe, Environmentalism, Gen, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), Protests
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:40:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22176424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: Another apocalypse may be coming; it's fairly concerning.
Series: Apocabingo [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/808302
Kudos: 2
Collections: Tic Tac Woe (The Apocabingo Community)





	Another Day Another Disaster

**Author's Note:**

> Completing my bingo line for tic_tac_woe this for the prompt 'Underground forces unleashed'
> 
> This fic manifested footnotes against my best intentions.

The crowd in central London was sizeable. Even by the standards of public protests in London it was unusually large and unusually orderly. Somewhere in the crowd the (former) Anti-Christ and the rest of the Them were attending their first proper protest march and it could be assumed that a little of his residual powers were leaking out to ensure it would be a perfect first time for Them. 

From a handy overlooking rooftop, one angel and one demon were watching the proceedings with interest. Knowledgeable observers of them – as opposed to of Them – might have suspected that one, other or both of this pair had something to do with the determinedly peaceful nature of the protest.1 Crowley had recently taken an interest in prison reform and suspected that Adam and co getting kettled might speed the whole process up nicely, but Aziraphale was oddly convinced that it was important that Adam stayed focused on the Anti-fracking movement, so Crowley was saving it up for a seventeenth birthday present. 

Aziraphale was watching the crowd in a brooding fashion – Crowley objected that watching things broodingly was his job, but Aziraphale did it anyway – or at least he appeared to be watching the crowd, probably he was actually trying to look through the crowd under the ground beneath their feet. Crowley had a vested interest in the disruption and inconvenience caused by Crossrail; he wasn’t going to let them accidentally collapse any part of the city on itself while they were at it. Nonetheless, Aziraphale had taken to contemplating the ground with a worrying intensity whenever he wasn’t focusing on anything else. Crowley wasn’t entirely sure quite what Aziraphale was worried about the humans disturbing things with their fracking experiments, humans had been undermining themselves in a literal fashion since the start of the industrial revolution and it all fell in on itself surprisingly rarely.2 However, Aziraphale was clearly worried and Crowley was perhaps feeling a little guilty - he’d talked the angel into indulging in naps only for him to be struck with some unpleasantly vivid nightmares _that he wouldn’t talk about_ 3 – and was therefore more than usually willing to indulge his companion.

So here they both were, at the end of a long and tiring few weeks of inspiring and tempting, according to their respective natures, the humans into doing something about it. Crowley was quite pleased with his work on politicians, lots of careful fiddly work with lobbyists, BEIS and Defra. A certain amount of manipulating taxi queues and traffic patterns to his advantage and occasionally outright trapping MPs in lifts with particular people. Aziraphale had said vague things about petitions and grass-routes protests that Crowley had dismissed as a bit woolly and ineffective. He took it back now, looking at the masses thronging the streets and bringing central London to a stand still. Apparently Aziraphale could still be seriously inspiring when he put his mind to it. 

If this didn’t give the politicians the final push they needed he wasn’t sure what would. Mostly however, Crowley just wished that Aziraphale would tell him what had him so very worried, he was sure the angel’s silences were far more worrying than anything that he could actually say.

~

The Them had arranged themselves on the steps of the bookshop.4 They were waiting patiently, partly because Adam had A Plan and there was no dissuading him. Mostly, because they had ice cream and they were in Soho, which while nowhere near as disreputable as they’d been led to expect, it was interesting and they were learning all sorts of interesting and unexpected things just by people watching. 

Some of the people were watching them back. One of them was the bookshop owner, who was radiating a force field of ‘harmless English eccentric’ which was largely on purpose, and also of mild irritation which was very much not. He was not pleased to see them. 

His companion on the other hand was wearing unusual sunglasses, implausibly tight jeans, and an air of insouciant ambiguity.5 He was delighted to see Them – or at least Adam – and was attempting, badly, to disguise it. 

The pair of them, and the group of Them, stared at each other for a long moment, neither willing to give ground. After a few moments that nonetheless felt several hours long, Adam gave an insouciant shrug and asked the first of the questions he’d come here to ask. 

“What’s really beneath the ground? I don’t mean soil and insects and sewers and Tube trains I mean below that, below the things we dig up?”

“Figuratively or literally,” asked sunglasses, before continuing, “figuratively your…” he paused at Adam’s raised eyebrows, “biological father and all that lot – “

“Your lot,” muttered the bookshop owner.

“Not anymore” sunglasses returned, “literally…”

“Literally,” the bookshop owner interrupted, “as I’m sure you learned in school, there is the mantle which is largely magma and other superheated semi-solid rocks and metals that sporadically get expelled through volcanoes and such-like. Below that is the core which is molten heavier metals that are also exponentially hotter.”

“And which of them are likely to make an incursion into our world if fracking continues unfettered,” asked Adam shrewdly. 

The bookshop owner’s entire demeanour changed, his voice was terribly quiet and terribly sad when he answered, “you’re having the dream too, aren’t you, all of you?”

“Not just us, all the protesters are, magma in the streets of wherever they live, and demons on motorbikes,” Pepper replied.

“That’s…that’s what you’ve been dreaming about?” asked the sunglasses wearer, his voice heavy with dread and something else that made the hair stand up on the back of the necks of everyone who heard it “they’re all dreaming your dream. That’s…not good.”

“No,” his companion agreed hollowly. 

They no longer looked merely ancient by the standards of teenagers – realistically about fifty – but actually ancient, the weight of millennia of existence suddenly visible. Before that moment, the rest of the Them would have sworn they’d never seen either of the other two before that day – their memories of End of the World being annoyingly fuzzy – but now they had a very specific memory of wings and a flaming sword and the certainty that these two were very much not human and equally not harmless. As one they shifted position to take up instinctively more defensive flanking positions around Adam. 

Sunglasses pulled himself together first and poked his companion in the arm. 

“Oi,” he said, something of his previous demeanour returning, “pull yourself together, you’re scaring the humans.” 

“Sorry,” murmured the bookshop owner, “I think you’d better come in, I think we’d better compare notes.”

The bookshop door popped open behind Them and the angel – the knowledge of just what this pair really were settled into their brains with a heavy finality that left no room for doubt – swept through Them into the shop. The demon gestured Them into the shop ahead of him with an oddly reassuring shoeing motion, locking the door behind them in a rather less reassuring fashion.

“I’m Crowley, he’s Aziraphale,” the demon gestured to where his companion had disappeared into the backroom, apparently to put the kettle on, “I see from your expressions that you remember what we are. On the plus side the two of us and you lot have a decent track record of preventing an intentional apocalypse when we weren’t working together. We’ve probably got a better chance of averting an accidental apocalypse if we’re actually working together.”

Aziraphale returned with a tray of tea, cups and biscuits looking rather more pulled together but the silence and the weight of what was to come hung heavy over them all. 

“Well,” said Pepper, breaking the silence, “where do we start?”

“Not at the beginning,” pre-empted Crowley quickly.

“With a dream,” said Aziraphale, “a vision from the divine.”

“A nightmare,” countered Adam, “a hellish vision.”

“Sometimes,” offered Crowley, “those can be surprisingly similar, just depends on your perspective, but I haven’t been having either so if someone could explain exactly what’s going on I think that would be an excellent starting point. 

Adam and Aziraphale looked at each other cagily for a long moment before nodding. Between them, they began to tell a story about a potential apocalypse that wasn’t going according to anyone’s plan.

1\. Aziraphale may or not have spent a disproportionate number of miracles over the decades looking after Pride events across these islands. Crowley on the other hand was visiting New York at the time of Stonewall and therefore has _opinons_ about cops at Pride.Back  
2\. The whole of Glasgow’s West End was slowly subsiding into the mines it was built on, and nothing had yet fallen into the Kelvin after all.Back  
3\. Crowley thought if She knew something about what was coming and wanted Aziraphale to do something about it, She should just ask. No need to send him creepy visions of the future on the rare occasion that he slept. Aziraphale thought She found dreams a more effective way to talk to humans than messenger Angels, he was quite grateful not to have been woken by Metatron instead.Back  
4\. Previously the bookshop had only had a doorstep, but the Them had needed somewhere to sit and the bookshop was accustomed to bending to the needs of ethereal/occult forces so had easily provided them with a set of three steps for them to arrange themselves on. Mostly as an apology for not letting them in. Back  
5\. Quite what kind of ambiguity he was exuding none of them could quite put their finger on, except Pepper who was seized by a sudden desire to channel that exact same energy, despite being as yet uncertain just what energy it was.6Back  
6\. Crowley would have been delighted. If asked he would have gladly told her it was every kind of ambiguity possible. Back  



End file.
